1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic musical instruments, and more particularly to a monophonic instrument with a touch sensitive keyboard for selecting tones and for controlling the amplitude with which such tones are produced.
2. The Prior Art
It is frequently desirable, in keyboard type musical instruments, to produce tones and other sounds with a variable amplitude or volume, under the control of the operator or player of the instrument. By this means, the operator can produce loud or soft sounds at will. Several arrangements have been developed in the prior art for performing such a function.
In monophonic instruments, such as electronic music synthesizers or the like, where a single tone is produced at any one time, it is desirable to provide a keyboard by which the amplitude of the sound is produced in a continuous manner, so that such a sound, produced continuously without interruption, may be continuously varied up or down in its amplitude or volume, without any interruption in the production of the sound. The apparatus which is available in the prior art does not provide means by which this may readily be done.
It is therefore desirable to provide a touch sensitive keyboard by which the volume or amplitude of a sound may be continuously varied, in response to the force applied to the keys of the keyboard, with such sound being initiated with the first touch of the key corresponding to such sound.
It is also desirable to provide a touch sensitive keyboard, having means for producing a control voltage in response to the force applied to the keys of the keyboard, which voltage can be used to control other parameters, such as the cutoff frequency of a filter, vibrato amplitude and frequency, or pitch bending.